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Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

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Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#251

Post by ant6n »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #154
ant6n wrote: post #136

Very interested in this. She questions: How does one migrate to this from Google photos? How does one share across the family? Is it possible to have a local backup (e.g. on my desktop) in case something goes wrong? What are plans for features beyond just storing photos (categorizing, tagging, labelling, albums, comments/notes, geotags, stories, etc.)? What's the pricing?

> How does one migrate to this from Google photos? You can export your data from takeout.google.com, and drag and drop the output folder into web.ente.io. > How does one share across the family? Currently we don't have family plans yet. Existing customers are sharing the same account with their partners. This is on our roadmap and we will ship it soon. > Is it possible to have a local backup? Our desktop app[1] has a…

Thanks for the detailed responses! Some more questions:

a) I note the pricing is somewhat higher than Google/Dropbox, which is fair. But is there a way to compress the media (esp. videos) before uploading it to conserve some storage? (I wish when Google still had unlimited 'high quality', it was possible to store photos in original and video in hi quality).

b) is there a way to detect duplicate photos, including of lesser quality, and only store the higher quality version? (E.g. photo comes from original device but also in a WhatsApp image folder because it was shared).

c) assuming search is on the roadmap based on feature detection, are there ways to find photos based on date/uploading device/camera/geolocation?

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#252

Post by vishnumohandas »

ant6n wrote: post #251
vishnumohandas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does one migrate to this from Google photos? You can export your data from takeout.google.com, and drag and drop the output folder into web.ente.io. > How does one share across the family? Currently we don't have family plans yet. Existing customers are sharing the same account with their partners. This is on our roadmap and we will ship it soon. > Is it possible to have a local backup? Our desktop app[1] has a…

Thanks for the detailed responses! Some more questions: a) I note the pricing is somewhat higher than Google/Dropbox, which is fair. But is there a way to compress the media (esp. videos) before uploading it to conserve some storage? (I wish when Google still had unlimited 'high quality', it was possible to store photos in original and video in hi quality). b) is there a way to detect duplicate photos, including of l…

All the features you requested for are already on our roadmap. :)

a) https://roadmap.ente.io/option-to-compress-photos-to-use-les...

b) https://roadmap.ente.io/deduplicate-files-p-1165/

c) https://roadmap.ente.io/search-by-metadata-and-exif-p-2487/

We will be shipping all of them.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#253

Post by benbristow »

bsanr2 wrote: post #177
benbristow wrote: post #23

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

>lets me search my library using text search for anything This is untrue, and actually one of the reasons I hope a strong competitor to Google Photos comes along soon. The search function is, for whatever reason, heavily censored and perhaps even biased in some circumstances. Worse, it is completely useless. For example, the query "fat" returns nothing, despite the fact that my gallery is filled with drawing referenc…

Think of it from Google's POV. Imagine if the tabloids found out about a situation of someone searching for 'fat' in the search bar and then it coming back with pictures of themselves or their friends - that could cause some serious controversy.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#254

Post by vishnumohandas »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #225

Is this encrypted at rest as well? Can you recover the data in case of a loss without seeing the data? Good project, really well done, browsing the GitHub a bit.

Thanks!

The data is encrypted once it leaves your device.

Not sure what you mean by a data "loss" here. If it's about the customer losing access to their password, as long as they have access to their recoveryKey, they will be able to sign in and change their password. If it's about something else, please let me know.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#255

Post by godelski »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #107
godelski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I'm really curious how you do this. If the photos aren't stored client side, then how do you search? Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side? Is that enough? I mean ImageNet scores are still pretty low for small/fast neural nets. And ImageNet isn't even representative of real world photos. So obviously to be successful you're going to have to continue training. So how do you do this in a privacy p…

> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models. > how do you do this in a privacy preserving way Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade of…

So I guess there is more to the question that I'm asking.

> Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade off between user experience and privacy here,

I think most people here understand that[0]. We are on Hacker News after all and not Reddit or a more general public place. The concern isn't that you are worse. The concern is that your product has to advance and get better over time. That mechanism is unclear and potentially concerning. The answer to this is the answer to how you ensure continued privacy.

You talk about the "push files/thumbnails for indexing" and this is what is most concerning to me and at the heart of my original question. How are you collecting those photos for _your_ training set? Obviously this isn't just ImageNet (dear god I hope not). Are you creating your own JFT-300M? Where are those photos being sourced from? What's the bias in that dataset? Obviously there are questions about the model too (CNNs and Transformers have different types of biases and see images differently). But that's a bigger question of training methods and that gets complicated and nuanced fast. Obviously we know there is going to be some distillation going on.

There's a lot of concerns here and questions that won't really get asked of people that aren't pushing privacy based apps. But the biggest question is how you get feedback into your model and improve it. Non-privacy preserving apps are easier in this respect because you know what (real world) examples you're failing on. But privacy preserving methods don't have this feedback mechanism. We know homomorphic encryption isn't there yet and we know there are concerns with federated learning (images can be recreated from gradients). So the question is: how are you going to improve your model in a privacy preserving method?

[0] I think people also understand that on device NNs are going to be worse than server side NNs since there's a huge difference in the number of parameters and throughput between these and phone hardware can only do so much.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#256

Post by godelski »

rock_hard wrote: post #124
vishnumohandas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models. > how do you do this in a privacy preserving way Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade of…

As someone who has worked on systems like these let me translate: “You stuff will be private but in return accuracy will be so bad that the UX is gonna suck!” That’s the key piece people miss when they wanna do anything with ML…that’s it’s a different problem compared to writing code because it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about having great training data!

To be honest, that wasn't a concern with my question. I think most people on HN understand this aspect. My question was more about how you improve your models when you don't have the same feedback mechanisms as non-privacy preserving apps. Google can look at your photos and see what photos fail and collect the biased statistics. In a privacy preserving version you won't be able to do this. Sure, you can on an internal dataset, but then there are lots of questions about that dataset's bias and if it is representative of the real world. I mean how many people think ImageNet is representative of real world images? A surprising number.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#257

Post by subpixel »

I like the fresh thinking, but I don't see a market for this.

What I see is a market for an Instagram replacement that is:

- not about filters or effects

- has flexible sharing settings (e.g. you can opt-in to looser privacy on a per-photo basis) that default to 'private'

- solves the storage and encryption of my photo library without me even having to understand it

That last item is a feature, not a product (but could provide an amazing moat around the product).

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#258

Post by d1lanka »

Neat.

Some UVP / Headlines to split test:

1. Keep your memories yours.

2. Safeguard your memories from prying eyes.

3. Don't let big tech creep on your memories.

4. Keep your memories private.

5. Block creepy algorithms from spying on your life.

I like the dynamic sub headline - perhaps test the following variation on that:

protect your {memories} from creepy algorithms

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#259

Post by vishnumohandas »

godelski wrote: post #255
vishnumohandas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models. > how do you do this in a privacy preserving way Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade of…

So I guess there is more to the question that I'm asking. > Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade off between user experience and privacy here, I think most people here understand that[0]. We are on Hacker News after all and not Reddit or a more general public place. The concern isn't that you are worse. The concern is that your product has to a…

> how are you going to improve your model in a privacy preserving method

We will not improve our models with the help of user-data and will resort to only pre-trained models that are available in the public domain.

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